Horatio Hornblower saga

"1793. Horatio Hornblower is only seventeen when he joins His Majesty's Royal Navy as a Midshipman. He's dangerously unschooled in seafaring and the ways of seamen, but he's saved by his quick, mathematical mind and keen eye ... This is where it all begins--where young Hornblower gets his sea legs and shows the makings of the legend he will later become."--Jacket.

After only one night with his bride, Hornblower, as commander of the frigate Hotspur, sails for duty off the French Coast to keep Napoleon from invading England.

June 1808, somewhere west of Nicaragua - a site suitable for spectacular sea battles. The Admiralty has ordered Captain Horatio Hornblower, now in command of the thirty-six-gun HMS "Lydia", to form an alliance against the Spanish colonial government with an insane Spanish landoner; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and "to take, sink, burn or destroy" the fifty-gun Spanish ship of the line "Natividad" or face court-martial....

As his naval battles with Napoleon conclude, Horatio Hornblower must rescue a man he knows to be a tyrant from the mutiny of his crew.

Captain Hornblower struggles to do his part to bring glory and victory to England during the Napoleonic Wars.